The American War Racket

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Bill Bonner earlier this week for the Daily Reckoning:

War is a racket. Always has been. Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler explains:

“[War] is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.

When George Bush was making gleeful threats to get us into a war with Iraq I told my Jiu Jitsu buddies that it would end badly. My prediction did not please them. The martial arts tends to attract people interested in martial activities. They seem to have an inbuilt propensity for war.

America’s two war-general presidents warned us against war. George Washington cautioned against getting into “foreign entanglements” and President Eisenhower predicted that the “military-industrial complex” would see to it that we were never not in a war. They were both right but that doesn’t dim the enthusiasm average American citizens have for it, despite its terrible cost in dollars and lives.